1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to controlling a printing apparatus, such as a color printer, and more specifically to user defined dynamic associations of colors to cartridges for color printers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Printers have become useful and commonplace output devices for putting the words or images displayed on a screen or held in a file onto paper or other printable surfaces. Some printers include multiple cartridges or implement color separation, to facilitate multi-color printing. For example liquid inkjet printers, laser toner based printers, pen based plotters, and dye-sublimation printers may provide color separation and printing. Many color printers detect or predict the amount of remaining ink of each separate color and can alert a user which ink cartridge is empty and needs to be replaced.
With each color of ink held in a separate reservoir and some ink colors used more frequently than other ink colors, some reservoirs may run out of color and need to be physically replaced before a color print job can be completed. For example, in a print job requiring magenta, yellow, cyan, and black ink, if the magenta cartridge is too low to print, the print job may stall until the magenta cartridge is replaced. In other printers, when a reservoir runs low, the printer may not stop printing a color print job, but instead prints pages with progressively faded shades of color until the ink is completely out and the resulting output pages are unusable.
While some printers may also interface with software that displays the detected levels of ink in each cartridge and alert a user via a display interface when an ink level reaches a minimum threshold, when a color of ink runs out, the user must still physically replace the expired ink cartridge with another cartridge with sufficient ink, in order for the printer to complete the print job. Often times, ink will run out quickly, such that a low ink warning does not provide sufficient time for a user to acquire a new cartridge.